Girl Meets World on FZ-07 Motorcycle: Chapter 2, Part 17

I want to feel really excited to have made it to New York, but this has been quite an…. experience. But not everything in traveling can be butterflies and rainbows, I guess, so let’s catch up anyways!

With our wet gear finally dry, a warm shower, and minds refreshed, we finally powered down into Indiana, where we rode through Amish towns full of horse drawn carriages. The women rode weirdly shaped bicycles that looked barely pedal-able with their long and immobile skirts, and everything seemed to move a little slower. I can now say I've seen a parking lot with horse parking. I should have tied up my iron pony for irony's sake, haha.

Skirting through the slow traffic, we trudged our way through Indiana and into Ohio. Dispersed camping had become borderline non-existent as we got further east, and more and more of the campgrounds were closing down for the season, so this was adding a new element of challenge to being moto-homeless. An old man at a local pub directed us to a nearby lake with an open and popular campground, where we froze our asses off, trying to sleep through dogs barking all night. Not a good start, Ohio.

But, a nice couple in the neighboring spot were kind enough to make us breakfast the next morning for no reason other than they were good people and we clearly don’t have much, which kind of made up for it. While this is a fairly common phenomenon when you travel on a motorcycle, it never stops being incredible. My faith in humanity has grown so much since leaving Los Angeles all those months ago.

Well, until we got to New York anyways. We left Ohio, following lake Erie, just skirting through Pennsylvania and into a place called Chautauqua on the Eastern New York border. After reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance earlier in the trip, I was pretty excited to camp in Chautauqua Forest just because of the name. We stopped at a local gas station and asked for directions, where, for really the first time this entire trip, I got a response full of venom and irritation just for asking a question. I paid the woman for the fuel, not pressing her conversation skills any further, then walked out to hop on my bike. As I was grabbing my gear, a man angrily rushed me out of my parking spot because apparently the existence of other people ruins his day. Eesh. What the hell have I walked into?

We made one last stop at a grocery store to resupply, where a woman hit me with her shopping cart without so much as an acknowledgement or apology. Three for three. Seriously, what the hell is even happening here? I had always heard people in New York weren’t the nicest, but this is a bit much. Way to be a stereotype, guys!

With spirits a little low and feeling pretty put off by the state already, we found our camp spot in Chautauqua, hoping to salvage the night with the beauty of the forest. Most nights when we camp, we don’t have cell service (this spot being no different), so we generally spend the nights reading books or dancing to pre-downloaded songs I have on my phone. No matter how rude people can be, that always works as a great mental reset and brings my spirits back up. We camped out in the woods and made our plan for the next day.

Next stop was Niagara Falls! Hollywood didn’t seem terribly interested in seeing them, as it’s obviously quite a tourist trap, but I refuse to come all this way and not see such an iconic bit of nature! We navigated through confusing city streets trying to avoid the abundant toll roads all over the state, and parked outside the park. But while it was gorgeous, it was somehow even more touristy than I expected, and the excessive exploitation of the falls was kind of sad to see. It seemed like every single bridge and pathway within the park was guarded by ticket booths charging $20 just to look at the water, and expensive hotels and casinos towered in the background. I’ve been to plenty of national parks that have been a bit over developed with resorts and gift shops, but this was a new extreme, and it ruined the experience a bit. We headed off toward a campsite 60 miles east, and rode into a designated multi-use area, where we set up our tent under the rain. The New York experience isn’t improving much. But huddling in the tent, sheltered from bad weather, drinking tea, and reading always seems to improve my mood, so we settled in and waited out the rain.

The next morning, we continued east toward the Hudson River. The last stop for this time through the state was going to be a spot called Bear Slide on the far east side. We stopped at a sporting goods store for some more supplies, and as we sat in the parking lot next to our bikes looking over the map, an older man came up to ask us about our adventure. When I started to answer one of his questions about maintenance on the road, he interrupted me confused, having assumed I was just a passenger. I stared at him dumbstruck and pointed out that there were clearly two bikes here. Obnoxious. When I traveled alone, people always made a point to remind me of how terrible the world was and how dangerous it is to be a solo woman and how I shouldn’t be riding alone. Now that I ride with Hollywood, I constantly am being dismissed as a passenger on someone else’s journey, and it’s consistently a shock to people that I might be capable of riding myself. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, I guess.

But, back on the road with a continued bad taste in my mouth for this state, we continued toward camp. Unfortunately, we had bad directions, and the locals gave us equally wrong directions in both instances where we stopped to ask. We made one last attempt to find the campground, trying a different fork in a dirt road, now after the sun had fully set and we only had a little remaining residual light. We finally found the campground and pulled into the first spot we could find. I set up the tent in the dark, trying to be careful to find a spot that didn’t have broken beer bottles strung through the patches of grass and dirt. Lovely. I’m really glad I’m almost out of New York, because the fall colors aren’t enough to make up for this. I think this is going on the list as the worst human experience I’ve had since I got harassed in Mississippi. I guess on the bright side, the rest of the east coast can’t possibly be much worse!